A Dietary Dilemma
by Nenalata
Summary: A purchased pig does not have any other uses to cover up the fact that it is, primarily, a meat-giving farm animal. Mineral Town frowns upon such an open declare of animal slaughter, but a struggling farmer like Claire has to make do with what she has.


Zach is the first to give her the dirty look, so she's slightly desensitized to that venom when she receives the next one.

The shipment is a pig: an adolescent pig, shiny pink with that little nose that burrows into its feed bag. Claire ignores Zach's icy glare as she signs the shipping receipt with one hand, holding the pig's harness in the other.

Even Won, who understands business, doesn't look happy with her. If it had been Barley or Rick or Karen who'd bought a pig, sure, no problem. They run chicken and cow and sheep farms. But only Claire is a jack-of-all-trades, so obviously when she buys a pig it's _bad_.

Walking the pig onto the beach where Kai is lounging is also _bad_. Even Kai should have understood, but no, she has to tolerate his disappointed stare. And of course in Rose Square there's the typical gossip corner, and they all get_ quiet_ as she and her new farm animal walk by, and once she's far away enough that they can pretend to underestimate her hearing when really they _want_ to her to hear their disapproval, they start chattering in frenzied whispers.

It's the longest walk home she's ever had to endure, and though only Gray, May and Popuri walk by and so that's only a few horrified looks she gets, she knows tomorrow it will be worse.

She locks the pig up in the barn, where it's happily greeted by the building's other inhabitants, and, worried about tomorrow, she puts her dog in there, too. For protection. She's not sure if angry villagers will actually try to steal the pig in the middle of the night and spirit it to safety, but it's better to be safe.

Well. Not her pig.

Claire doesn't sleep well that night, so when she opens her door and the first thing she sees is a line of angry townspeople looking at her in varying expressions of dislike, it doesn't exactly make her sleep-deprived mood better. She feels like she's just built an entire fence out of golden lumber and now Mineral Town wants to torch her struggling farm down.

She knows why they all object, of course. With chickens and sheep and cows, if you like their meat, at least you can _pretend_ you've bought them for other purposes. One can assume you wish to sell their eggs, or their wool, or their cheese. Even on distant islands like Waffle Island, where there are many exotic animals, you can still buy a duck without having to explain to its previous owner that really, all you want to do is make a nice dinner in a few evenings. You can argue that you feel like selling eggs.

But what else is a pig good for, other than pork? Not many people are willing to buy pig milk, or pig-hair blankets, or other piggy products. It's obvious that once this peppy porker reaches a certain age, Claire will bring the old sickle down (or axe, or hammer, or—Goddess save its soul—the _pedometer_) and chop it up into porky portions. Then she'll have to suffer angry Zach stares while she hands him the paper-packaged pig to be sold for a few yen to mainland restaurants.

Claire is getting desperate. When a relative back home heard about her financial situation and offered to send a young pig her way, it wouldn't be fiscally wise to refuse. She'd completely forgotten that island folk seemed to be averse to openly eating meat. She wondered if they all had secret stores of the stuff hidden behind paintings and lampshades and plants that they gorged themselves on late at night, when no one would know what they were up to. But Goddess forbid that this diet be _openly declared_.

Claire had hoped that maybe the villagers would chalk this up to her being new, but apparently Mineral Town assumed that the No Pig rule was widely accepted throughout the world. Or maybe they just hoped that their ways would leak into the young amateur farmer's brain.

They were wrong.

But Claire needed money, and besides, it was too late for her to actually _do _anything other than close the door and hide from the townspeople. For the next few weeks, she didn't say anything if the shopkeepers raised their prices just for her, or if her lunch at Doug's was served late, cold, and over-cooked, or if the shopping network would unconvincingly tell her that the furniture she wanted was out of stock once she gave them her name. Even her TV commercials started featuring veggie-based diets, and the after-school special messages all seemed to be about respecting animals.

When the time came for Claire to play butcher, the entire town was frightfully cold and the streets were silent as she carted the refrigerated box to the beach to be shipped.

She comforted herself by knowing that, along with the money she'd received, cooked pork tasted marvelous with this year's fresh apples.


End file.
